tiger tiger burning bright
by sweetwatersong
Summary: And what shoulder and what art / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? They say blood is thicker than water; it turns out the blood of one ragtag archer is enough to link a defecting Russian operative and a veteran SHIELD agent together.


**tiger tiger burning bright**  
rating: pg-13  
characters: Clint Barton, Phil Coulson, Natasha Romanoff  
warnings: injuries

author's note i: Title and quotes from _The Tiger_ by William Blake.  
author's note ii: This is Part I of a sort-of series; Part III is _upon this rock (my house shall stand)._ (Part II hasn't been posted yet. See what I mean by 'sort-of'?) If I were to describe it, I'd say it's 'Strike Team Delta rescues its people, or: Clint Barton gets beat up a lot.' Both are accurate.

summary: _And what shoulder and what art / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? _They say blood is thicker than water; it turns out the blood of one ragtag archer is enough to link a defecting Russian operative and a veteran SHIELD agent together.

_tiger tiger burning bright_

"Clint Barton is dead," the SHIELD agent says bluntly, staring at the gray-eyed young woman sitting in the chair opposite him. Her legs are nonchalantly crossed, her posture against the cold metal as causal as if she couldn't have a care in the world – but that impression is shattered when she moves, almost faster than he can follow. By the time the chair clatters onto the floor she has him pressed against the wall with one hand, fingers curling under his jawline as she snarls, leans into him with a gesture that's both sexual and intimidating.

"Who killed him?" She demands, her fury cutting through the sound of his gasping, struggling attempt to breathe. Maldive is just beginning to see spots before the door swings open and Coulson enters, halting with his hand still on the door handle.

"That's enough."

Romanoff spins at his words, all lethal violence and smooth energy held together by gravity, spitting and furious and unafraid even here, in the heart of SHIELD. _Fury's got it wrong,_ Coulson realizes as he meets her sparking gaze. Taming this tiger isn't an option; the best they'll be able to do is try and stay on top of her, try to ride her momentum. It would be better for all of them if she quietly vanished… But he's a man of his word, and he had given that word to Clint.

It will take more than a young Russian spy to get him to break it.

"I'm sorry. We just wanted to see how you'd react. If you had killed him, you wouldn't have been so surprised."

She cares nothing for Phil, he can tell, her narrowed eyes dismissive and scornful – but that changes, the scorn sliding away as an intent focus sets in.

"He's truly dead?"

Coulson waits a beat, then tips his head towards the man she still has pinned to the wall.

"Why don't you let him down first? Killing an agent isn't going to help your case very much."

The Russan opens her fingers, letting Maldive's feet touch the floor, and angles her body away from him – and, subsequently, towards Phil. _Talk_, her gaze says, her feet pacing towards him with coiled grace, the lines of her body tense and swaying. _Tiger_, Phil thinks to himself, and keeps a level eye on her until she stops only a few steps after starting.

"Barton's been missing for four hours now. His last check-in was shortly after he made contact with you."

_"Boy, Coulson,"_ Clint had chuckled into his voicemail, _"you're going to hate me for this one. I've given her directions to the outpost in Seattle. If she makes it there by tonight, she really is that good. Promised her we'd at least give her a shot –not the kind in the back. We'll have to make a stop at a CVS on the way to HQ; Fury's gonna need more antacids if she stays. Look, I've gotta take care of something. I'll check in at twenty-one hundred. I know when my curfew is, believe it or not."_

"And you think I murdered him and dumped his body in an alley somewhere?" She purrs, moving slowly forward again.

"It isn't beyond reason," Coulson replies steadily. She pauses, cocking her head to one side while the antagonism in her calculating gray eyes shifts to something more subtle. He has surprised her. "You were, after all, an enemy operative."

And with that careful phrasing, with a single past tense, he has her. She rocks back on her heels almost imperceptibly, shifting from fight mode to studying the problem, analyzing it.

"It wasn't me," she says finally, head still tipped to the side.

"I gathered that."

She brushes off his comment and continues on.

"The last I saw of him, he was heading towards the back alleys of the city. The only other players in town were the Chinese, a handful of ko'dak merchants, and a Nocturna sect." Coulson conceals his surprise at the list; they hadn't known about the ko'dak group. Unless, of course, she's making it up. "Has he done anything to piss them off?"

"Barton manages to piss a lot of people off," Coulson tells her, and she snorts in agreement or laughter. "But he has had past encounters with the Nocturna trafficking ring. We had intel they were working the north side of the sector."

He knows that's wrong the moment her shoulders shift, the weight coming back onto the balls of her feet. As quickly as that the calmer, matter-of-fact attitude vanishes, and a tiger waiting to begin the hunt is crouched in front of him.

"They were, until they started picking kids up from the bad part of town. He's run into the group before?"

"He makes a point of hassling operations that involve human trafficking." Too many memories of kids that vanished during his time on the streets, Clint told him once, after delaying an extraction six hours to play merry havoc with a sex trafficking ring. Runaways and child strippers who had been there one night, gone the next. With the dark look in his eyes, Coulson hadn't asked if he had ever been a victim – or, since he had survived and gone on to work in the circus, had a close escape.

There are still too many things he doesn't know about his agent, but Phil wonders now if that has played a part in his decisions regarding Romanoff. In some ways, the Red Room and the Nocturna aren't all that different.

The muscles under Romanoff's deceptively soft skin flex, relax, and she shows in her teeth in what could almost have been a smile.

"Are you going to invite me to come with you?"

Coulson studies her calmly, never letting on the tension that began forming in his gut when she corrected him about the Nocturna.

"Are you going to behave?"

Romanoff does bare her teeth at that, her full lips drawing back before easing into a coy smile.

"You don't own me."

"No, and I don't owe you. But you owe Clint…" And when she blinks, the flinch barely noticeable, he knows he has her. "…and that's good enough for me right now. If they are in the back alleys, we'll take two teams and a chopper."

"Please tell me _he's_ not going to be coming along," she says disdainfully, flicking a hand at the recovering Maldive.

"No, we let our agents get some rest between play dates," Coulson returns smoothly, but she doesn't bother to react to his line. Instead she takes another prowling step closer, now standing within his reaching distance, and her gray eyes are serious.

"If the Nocturna took him, they'll torture him, especially if he's butchered their plans before." Her voice is low, steady.

"I know."

She studies his face, reading there what Coulson can only guess, before she speaks again.

"Then every second counts. Let's get going."

Two hours later they find him in bloodied shackles in the corner of a disused warehouse, his arms stretched above his head as he sits on the splattered concrete.

"Took you guys long enough," he croaks when they come sweeping through the remains of the rusted doors, guns and flashlights fanning the dusty concrete. "Jesus, I thought I was going to have to build a bat signal or something."

Romanoff is by his side before Coulson has made it five steps in, the spy crouching to touch his face and catalog his injuries with clear grey eyes. Her fingertips barely touch a cut on his cheek before dropping to hover above a gash on his diaphragm, the movements economical, precise. _Tiger_, Coulson thinks again, and stops at Barton's outstretched feet, the two kids placed in front of him. He slides the lock picks out of his jacket and hands them to Natasha.

"I thought I directed you not to go off task again this mission, Barton."

"You know me, sir," Clint retorts, almost stumbling over the syllables, "hear an order and can't wait to disobey it."

"Yes, well, at least one good thing has come out of your recent misadventures."

Natasha doesn't appear to react to his words, her focus still on slipping Clint's hand out of the last manacle.

"They won't be collecting children in this city anymore," she explains softly, inspecting the bruises on his knuckles.

"That's good," he replies, trying to keep his eyelids open and failing.

"I would say your defection is the better of the two outcomes, Romanoff," Coulson tells the Russian spy, whose shoulders tense slightly before she turns her head to look at him. "We didn't know the ko'dak had an interest in this area. With your intel and sources, not to mention your skills, we can do more to try and stop this kind of thing," with a nod to the scattered Nocturna supplies, "more often."

"Toldja," Barton slurs as he rests his elbows on his knees. It isn't clear who he's addressing; maybe it doesn't matter. "'Sides, I wasn't counting contact with Romanoff as a mis'venture, Coulson," he points out, half-conscious. Natasha shifts to let him lean against her for support, folding the lock picks back together with fingers tacky with Clint's blood, and offers the set back to Coulson.

_Tiger, tiger, burning bright…_ He thinks to himself, and slips the picks into his pocket, holding out his hand again.

"Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Romanoff."

She takes his hand, and Clint's blood smears between their palms as they shake on it.

_Did He smile His work to see?  
Did He who made the lamb make thee?_


End file.
